Summary: Bifurcations in turbulent rotating Rayleigh-Bénard convection: A finite-size effect
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2011 J. Phys.: Conf. Ser. 318 082015
(http://iopscience.iop.org/1742-6596/318/8/082015)
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Bifurcations in turbulent rotating Rayleigh-Bénard
convection: A finite-size effect
Stephan Weiss and Guenter Ahlers
Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA
E-mail: guenter@physics.ucsb.edu
Abstract. In turbulent rotating Rayleigh-Bénard convection Ekman vortices extract hot or cold fluid from
thermal boundary layers near the bottom or top plate and enhance the Nusselt number. It is known from
experiments and direct numerical simulation on cylindrical samples with aspect ratio D/L (D is the
diameter and L the height) that the enhancement occurs only above a bifurcation point at a critical inverse
Rossby number 1/Roc, with 1/Roc 1/. We present a Ginzburg-Landau like model that explains